In media streaming, multimedia content (e.g., video content) is presented to a user on a client device while portions of the content are being delivered, as distinguished from receiving the entire multimedia content before playback. The hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) has been widely adopted as the application protocol for media streaming over the Internet because of its ease of deployment with existing web servers and scalability with the web caches. In HTTP streaming, multimedia content is divided into at least one sequence of media segments, with each media segment typically being regarded as a separate resource for HTTP requests and responses. The media segments are individually addressable by unique uniform resource locators (URLs) and are delivered individually using the stateless request-response protocol. HTTP streaming enables a client to stream the multimedia content by submitting, to the server, multiple requests corresponding to the multiple media segments.
With the rapid growth and popularity of smart phones and tablets, media streaming on mobile devices using HTTP over wireless networks, such as cellular networks (e.g., 3G and 4G/LTE), have become a trend. Unlike more traditional media streaming platforms such as desktop devices, mobile devices are greatly power constrained. For example, most smart phones need nightly charging, making the battery power an extremely constrained resource. However, in a media streaming scenario, a large amount of data is typically transmitted to the mobile device via a wireless radio interface, which consumes a large amount of battery power. The power consumption is further exacerbated by resource management protocols of the wireless networks. Generally, the resource management protocols dictate power levels to the mobile device even when no media segments are being transmitted. Because the mobile device streams multimedia content in HTTP by individually requesting the different media segments and because the resource management protocol of the wireless network dictates the power level to the mobile device for each request, HTTP streaming over a wireless network to the mobile device results in power inefficiencies.